


mathew 3:11

by summerson



Category: Warrior Nun (TV)
Genre: Angst, Baptism, Everyone Has Issues, Everything Hurts, F/F, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Repentance, Sad Puppy, also i love the new poster floating around where ava is holding two divinium swords, ava and beatrice are both so repressed oh my god, big sister camila, big sister lilith all the way, camila is probably the youngest but is also somehow the big sister, especially ava and beatrice, like - babe is bi i don't know what you want from me, lilith says she doesn't care but just look at her, mary is underpaid, seriously mary is underpaid, they're basically made for each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:34:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27136709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerson/pseuds/summerson
Summary: Something in the younger girl’s chest seizes with an energy and force that makes the whirring thrum of the halo pale in comparison to this newfound presence in her heart. So Ava, true to nature and impulsivity, grips it tight and runs with it, leaping off the cliff and abyss wings spread wide.“I’d like you to baptize me.” She says.“…”“Please,”~Set some time in the demon hunting, halo bearing, road tripping future we all crave and need.
Relationships: Shotgun Mary & Ava Silva, Sister Beatrice/Ava Silva, Sister Camila & Ava Silva, Sister Lilith & Ava Silva
Comments: 16
Kudos: 102





	mathew 3:11

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve noticed this fandom really likes to kick the shit out of Ava, and seeing as my own personal social lacking regarding empathy leads my self constructed ego to simultaneously project onto and live vicariously through fictional character’s suffering in order to simulate the feeling of deep emotional connection which is further encouraged by my compulsive nature to manifest theoretical scenarios of angst…I’m here for it. Let’s get wrecked. Also I was at the beach last week and had major ass sunburn so this is like, cathartic.

She’s on fire.

_…-Ava!…_

She’s aflame.

_…Ava! -…Ho…_

Her soul is burning from the inside out.

… _-ld on, ok?…-hold on-…_

From the outside in…

_…Keep those eyes -…me, you hear?…_

A wildfire scorching in the dead brush, a solar flare arcing off the rim of vagrant meandering stars cartwheeling into space. Stars…she feels like a star.

_Camila! - ake her…Lilit-…_

She feels like a thousand pound roiling mass of gas in the sky. She feels like rockets exploding on hot June nights during the festivals of her childhood in Lisbon. A hot battery in the car. A thrumming nuclear core. She feels it in the impact of electric kinetic volts rocketing through the branches of her nerve networks with the brilliance of a thousand wayward showering comet tails.

She feels it in the atomic bomb, mushroom clouding in the void of vision deep within her eyes….

Her chest

_…-astard! -_

Her head

_…lith! Wait! - …er-_

Her hands, her legs.

Her face, her _heart_.

_…shhh……_

_The halo…_

still humming thrumming _drumming_ against her flesh with the aftershocks of its burning pulse.

The clank of cold ringing metal cries out somewhere behind her, above her…the familiar celestialblue blades flashing in the sphere of her peripheral…where - ? What was happening? She couldn’t see. She couldn’t stand.

There was no end or division to the storm. Contained in nothing. Spilling over freely like the dark warmth that poured out of her side. Liquid ink slipping out with her breaths that drew shallow even as she feels a gentle pair of hands ease her chin up, tilt her neck back so her throat could open to let the oxygen flow. Her fingers find and dig into the give of cheap pleather underneath, that flaccid sticky feel under her wet palms when her body finally meets surface and her front peels away from the one pressed up against her. Each movement a displacement, a disruption to the pop rocks of pain that set off in her cagey lungs.

She’d watched a ton of documentaries during her time at St. Michael’s. Lots of them. Some of them interesting, some of them not. Most all of them Animal Planet in order to sate Diego’s childhood affinity for lions. She’d humored him if only to save her conscious of course; but in lieu of the late night hours of the post 3:11 eve times, after the younger would well and truly be passed out beyond conscious recollection, she had managed to eek in a few stray hours of an anatomy special on HBO. They’d shown a diagram of the human body, one of those ridiculous simulation models that don’t look anything at all what they’re depicting. Lots of artistic liberty and all that. But regardless of the shoddy quality and dramatic budget cuts Ava did remember the lengthy, albeit boring exploration of all the soft vulnerable insides packed tightly in the body’s brickwork. Compactly connected for every rafter nerve line and secreting organ, insulated in intestines, cemented with muscle tissue, held together all the way down to the blood vessels that circulated from head to toe, tip to tail.

Important parts that allowed the living architecture of body hold against the unyielding elements.

Suffice it to say a ribcage, blown open and splintering with shards of divinium shrapnel and broken bits of her own studded rib was…less than ideal.

Sensations pass and change like images through the tongues of fire, herself a passive bystander. They flow over her body, casting prickles of heat and shadows with what conceivable imprint they manage to impose…The sound of gravel under footfall, the flurry of movement. Salt tracks, going crisp and clotting on her cheeks, fingers twitch against the grainy roughness underneath. And she shudders once, full body and wracking when the fabric rips open and bares her to the rushing cold of open air.

A soft hand in her hair. On her face…

Ava seethed one ragged flailing gasp in. The air rattles out in the back of her throat where the blood clots and rakes like grainy sandpaper down with each parsing swallow. Her fingers claw and dig deeper and she forces - _forces_ her neck to crane as far as it can towards the carnage still raging in an abruptly murky distance.

_“-Lilith…”_

The sound bubbles up like a fountain, gurgling lowly like a dry spring from the sand and rock amidst the dessert. A tightness and constricted knot in her chest wrings tighter - holds tighter and makes every muscle seize in nuclear centralized tension, as if to keep it contained from spilling over and out onto the ground and all over her feet. Guts all over her feet…the heat of it sprays a little across her lips with the next roiling wave.

_“Mary - “_

_“It’s ok, they’re a- …ight - ‘m right here - …ng anywhere,” It’s all tin and garbled noise, like the rain against the window panes at St. Michael’s. Like the mumbling radio static that fell free and incessant from the shortwave in the common room. The world outside, far away…but just close enough to torment. Sister Frances had used to park Ava’s wheelchair just in front of the gate on all her mandatory walks, dutifully parking her in front of black solid barbs and welded iron just on the bare perimeter of that bleak voided trench. The sun on her face. The hateful heat of it soaking down into her skin, wading in sunlight and sunburn seeping deep into her soul like a sun shower. She could still hear the sounds of their laughter…_

“ _Just focus on my voice.”_

And Ava does. Follows it through the haze and horror that’s dancing behind her eyes and in the fibrous mesh tearing free in her side. Listens to their voice lilt and press down - address someone else, shout out into the open air above them until it returns to whisper in Ava’s ear, soft against the blood stained strands by her temple. It talks her through the confusion. Talks her through the pain that’s begun to dangerously fade. And Ava listens to them with all that she is, because her sight is leaving. Ava listens, because their voice is fading, her hands - her body…it’s slipping away.

“… _va!?”_

The last thing she registers is the trembling, fingers wrapped and tangled betwixt each other grasping desperately even as she abruptly, suddenly, simply - …ceases.

__________

She is too disoriented and in pain to process much of what follows. How much time passes, how many shifts fall while her breaths wheeze once and winnow out slow is unknown. But the voices filter in like whispers around her, speaking hushed and dancing with heat in some unfathomable unreachable space that leaves her craving solitude from what flickers beyond her closed eyelids.

“…ouldn’t have done that.” A voice sounds out in the ethereal incorporeality, weathered and bedraggled like black bitter coffee from the steep. Like her mother used to take…

“He was getting away,” another, sharp and furious like the prickle of cat claws makes itself known. Ava can hear them from far away, and very near. Inside and outside her head like objects casting shadows and echoing imprints against the wall. It unravels like a story, she herself forced to watch chained and immobilized against the wall.

“Both of his Godamn legs were broken.”

The air hiccups and catches on the sound of a scoff, complacent and crisp, and she has difficulty discerning which digs deeper.

“He was _crawling_ away,”

“So you tried to kill him?”

“Mary, please. We shouldn’t be fighting in front of her - “

“I was under the impression we were all on the same page in regards to traitors and backstabbers.” _Feet against threaded weave carpet, cigarette smoke soaked in through the fibers for an indefinite eternity. Breath rattles like glass._ _Bones creak like floorboards. The darkness of eyelids and fake sleep…It’s all sensationally abhorrent and grating in the paper shelters of bedsheet covers and disregarding forces beyond control._

“And considering the particular traitor I would think _you_ of all people would want to do right by Shannon, if not A - “

**_BAM!_ **

_Furniture upturning. Wood shafts splintering against impact…she looks away. It doesn’t matter._

“ _You finish that sentence and I’ll make you regret ever crawling back out of Hell_.”

…

“We are in the midst of a thousand year rotting _shit show_ , of institutionally sponsored corruption in what is honestly starting to feel like a seemingly endless queue of fucking patriarchal bullshit.” _Thunderous. Roaring. Righteous._ _The very foundations of the walls shake and rattle with its magnitude and hungry enigmatic fury, world and space rendered complacent and way laid bare underneath the torrent and blossoming anger._ “Our one and only job right now is to get answers and save the world from a Godamn egomaniac _satanist_. _In that order_.”

_The power of voice resonates like brassy tolls, rolling like a fading thunderstorm in the distance that rings only of depthless silence. Its presence treading after in its wake like distant rippling water._

It’s nostalgic in disorder. Familiar in disruption. And that at least, she wonders, should be found comforting in consistency and constance. From the droning rotting machine that was St. Michael’s, and further still the wreckage of memories that don’t quite exist in full clarity anymore. Back when she had a different life, different demons, different name…

_Complacent under the blankets, curled in on the cloud of breath and darkness settled in the hollow of her front and crooked knees. Breathing, breathing, breathing. Feigning sleep under the pattering beat of her heart that’s a hummingbird in her chest. All spindly limbs and youthful innocence hidden under the bedroom shadows and crystalizing exterior._

_It’s quiet_

“…We’ll talk about what I want to do with the son of a bitch after.” _Subject closed._

_She sleeps_

…

…

…

…

“I should’ve seen her - “

“Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s true though - “

_“Enough.”_

_“_ …”

“You couldn’t have known. Vincent’s been playing his pipe at us for so long I think I actually thought - …” a lapse of silence rings momentary in the atmosphere like the gravity of a candle wick. “We all knew the risks in trusting him, Ava included. It’s a mistake we all made, together.”

The silence is long and trembling. Like a candle wick. Like the curl of paper tinders plugs blazing up in the hearth haven mantle at Cat’s Cradle grand hall. Logs popping and splintering open and glowing veins of ember to ash. If Ava stares into them she can feel their heat prickle and radiate across her face.

“…is that why Beatrice can’t look me in the eye?”

“…I’ll talk to her,”

…

…

…

…

…

…

“…You want to talk about it?”

“No,”

The voices are more like sounds, gathered together into the buffering feedback of a long drawn agitated sigh. “ _oook_ , you wanna talk about why you’re being such a bitch to Camila then?”

“…”

“She’s been killing herself with regret and self doubt as it is, Bea. And this cold shoulder act isn’t helping things.”

“I can’t control what assumptions her guilt fabricates. Whatever conclusions she’s come to she’s done so on her own,”

The scoff is quick and curt like a slap on the hand. The sting no more harmful than a harsh shocking strike of wind from the bluff. But just as callous, just as jarring. “You know sometimes Beatrice I forget who’s more of a child, you or Ava.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Beatrice’s voice hardens and solidifies like rock skin, and there’s an imperceptible shiftas she turns away and towards the conversation at hand. “I haven’t done anything to encourage these kinds of delusions.- “

“No, you _haven’t_ done anything, have you? You haven’t spoken to her, haven’t looked at her, haven’t even acknowledged she’s still _alive_ \- and honestly she might as well not be for the way you ignore her. Seriously, you haven’t even been _here_ since -…Ava.” 

A lapse of silence. She can hear the sound of movement as Beatrice turns back to what she imagines is her prone body, voice turned to whisper even as it sounds clearer.

“…It’s not on purpose.”

Another sigh, this time laced with exasperation. “Sorry, I forgot.” She says. “’ You just need something to focus on.’ ”

And Ava can’t tell what stings more, the disappointment or the disapproval

The sound of rustled fabrics stirs to motion as they make to stand and retreat, footsteps softly padding into the distance before holding at the threshold. The door handle twists and the air holds still with a painful clinging tension long after departure.

“…”

…

…

…

…

…

…

It is night when she finally - _finally_ lays claim to consciousness. There are no fires burning red behind her eyes. No half thoughts or stray thunderstorms raking through the thrush when everything is suddenly shuttered back into existence.

There is quiet…a half settled silence that moves as it rests over atmosphere. Even with her eyes shut and still, she can hear the low treble of cicadas, trickle down like cricket tune and hum in dark night. She feels it in the dry grass, grown stiff and brittle with a familiar arid heat that simmers like waves over the red rocks - now gone still under the moon as the veritable heat seeps down into the earth. Down down down into the core of dust and stone where lava beds and river reds roil beneath, sinking slinking down until the top soil dries, uncurls, and eventually laxes.

It’s a familiar feeling, being splayed out on her back like this. Wrapped and tucked beneath the cotton fiber of starchy laundered blankets. The outside, just in reach beyond the open tomb, the open window - she feels her heart strain for it with such intense longing, it’s enough to bring a lonely winnowing whimper from her wheezy lungs and out her open lips.

The unease and soreness takes hold as soon as she’s stirred. Her muscles screaming as every shift and ripple spikes an electric nerve end with flares of fire, both legs seizing up as her feet arch and her back lifts to curl away - _away away away._

She can feel the sting of tears prickle behind her eyelids, their volume and presence rupturing up her throat and chest like a swelling threatening tide - promising flood gates and broken dams across the levy wetlands. Her breath halts and stutters in quarter quenching gasps as she braces against it. Hands clenching, teeth gritting as she bears into it and begs for it to pass.

_“-vanelle?” a voice sounds urgent by her bedside._

She struggles to tamp it down. Grits her cage teeth tighter and screwed at the jaw to smother it before her blubbering can start spouting. A spray of spittle fountains up and hissing through the lock jaw and she groans, muffled and stifled as she clamps down harder - locks down harder to keep it under lock and key. _God, it burns._

The voice sounds again. Softly this time, softly…younger.

_“_ Ava, can you hear me?”

A moment to pass. She pieces together what she can of her faculties and remembers to breathe even as the action drags her across coals. It’s all fuzzy behind her eyelids and dizzying in the worst way. Until eventually, consciously, she squints her eyes open to the foreign ceiling above and strains to understand.

The room she inhabits is small and modest. That much she gathers. Popcorn drywall and a single TV set propped up on the open dresser, a stray cobweb wistfully stringing across under the lampshade. The pallet she’s splayed out against is shoved up against the plaster wall in the corner, a rumpled lumpy mattress cot cushioning her from underneath. There’s also a dilapidated AC unit boxed into the window, the tin and metal deeming itself suspicious, wrapped up in duck tape and leaking chemical coolant down the sides like a melting ice cube.

She blinks to clear the blear and confusion before slowly craning her head against the pillow. When her eyes finally dilate enough to see clearly she notices she that she was right, it is night outside the window - black panes painted in the likeness of oblivion and blotted out like absence and obsidian.

“Well well…if it isn’t the human firecracker,” The scratchy pillowcase rustles as she dips her chin back down to earth. Mary sits forward on her knees in a low seat chair. She’s practically level with the bed as her malt brown eyes peer into Ava’s cloudy ones, appraising and steady as she orients herself to the newness of the environment. Hands hovering over her arm before one arm reaches out and braces the mattress. Not touching. But close so that she can feel the pressure squeeze in through the sheets.

Ava’s face breaks a little with the gesture.

“What hurts?” Ava blinks again and forces her eyes to train upwards again, reaches with a crawling lingering gaze until it lands on - Beatrice. Her hair is tied back but free from the blue treads of Cat’s Cradle habit or combat gear, so the dark strands glow a deep umber, casted and silhouetted bronze as the lamplight sunsets behind her. It softens the edges.

Ava clears her throat and chokes on the staleness when she forces forth a shallow whisper.

“… _everything_?”

“That’s probably a good thing,” Mary concedes trailing backwards and dragging her hand from the comforter. A childish part of Ava misses it the second it falls away from the mattress.

Beatrice raises up from the floor where she’d been stooped and kneeling near elbow height, turns away somewhere beneath the bed and fiddles with the sounds of a zipper and the plastic crunch of a water bottle as the cap snaps with a decisive twist. When she orbits back to view her hand slips fluid and gentle between the pillow and the nape of Ava’s neck where they brush up against the baby hairs and help leverage her head up for one long merciful sip.

The plastic angles up incrementally so as not to drown her, but comes back every time she careens back up, fingers stretching and flexing in the sheets while the water drips down her chin and neck. It’s heaven sent sweetness in a bottle. Crystal cool. River rush blue. And her lungs for once are awashed and cleansed of toxic black smog and briefly - _briefly_ flooded clean. When she’s done, Beatrice lowers her head back down and caps the bottle before returning to her side, arms crossed and settled over the sheets without dipping into the mattress. Her eyes crinkle in concern when Ava’s breath wheezes out with a disconcerting rattle.

“OhGodAquafinatastessomuchbetterthanDasani,” she sputters, breathing deep. Her eyes squeeze shut once more and she concentrates on the next wave of pain that rockets across her spine. Then quietly…“Feels like I got hit by a truck,”

Mary smirks, head supported by the hand she’s leaning into, forefinger pressed into her temple. “Should see the truck.” She states simply.

Ava almost laughs. She’s been rubbing off on them all in her own way. Mary’s obviously and endearingly adopted some latent form of sarcasm by blatant exposure (Lilith, naturally, did not count - seeing as she had no veritable proof of a soul let alone a beating heart). Though she doesn’t miss the look Mary shoots Beatrice, who stares rigidly to the side and hyper focuses on the fiber threads of the pillow case under her head.

But she shifts at the implication - “…Vincent?”

Mary pauses and flickers to Beatrice who seals her lips and breathes steady out her nose.

Finally, “…He’s alive.”She sighs. “We got him. Lilith’s keeping him in good company right now,”

Well, at least that was some good news.

“What happen - “ Ava is immediately lanced through with lightning as she tries and fails to curl upwards. Stuck and cramped in a stiff jaw clenching freeze before the hand on her shoulder eases her back into the mattress.

“Don’t try to move,” Beatrice instructs. Thumb drawing a stray circle into the bandages Ava notices wrapping around her wrist bone, peeking out of her shirt collar, sticky and wet with the sweat beading on her skin. “The divinium lacerated your lungs; internal bleeding flooded your organs…”

Oh.

“You remember everything?” Mary prompts when Ava’s settled back onto the pillow and her chest levels out with her heartbeat, the throbbing receding down to shuddering complacency as she seethes at the pain.

“Ah…” she intones, “I remember the rendezvous.” _The Spanish Steps, shingling down the cut and sloping down to the base of the Piazza di Spagna, the Trinita Dei Monti sihillouting a stoic edifice rising above across a dusty bruising sky._ “Talking…” _Gentle gurgled pattering raining against the cement and water. All the tourists shuffled away into their Air BnB burrows as the cobbles sputter empty and vacant. “_ and then - uhm…” _Vincent._

Ava’s eyes snap open and her chin jerks sharply to the right, hand come up and fingers splayed in the air reaching out like cast lines. The urgency is doused by lead limbs and fluttering lungs, but lacks none of the desperation and open grief when her voice scratches and wrenches out.

_“Camila?”_

You would think she was about to cry.

Mary shushes her before the panic can fully engulf. Hand upraised complacently and urges Ava to lean back down by pressing softly at the fabric of the oversized sleep shirt. “She’s good. She’s ok.”

Ava shuts her eyes and lets the sting in her chest stab through. Tries to breathe. Tries not to let it expand. Tries to will the air to flow through without stretching the skin and bone of her toroso with the way her nerve ends flare. Her skin feels stripped and raw, like she’s been skinned and flayed. But - Camila was ok. Everyone was alive. No one was dead. No one was dead because of her. Good…

Good…

The next draw in is a little watery and gross but she needs to confirm what she thinks she already knows. 

“…I think I exploded.” She says.

“That’s one way of putting it.” Mary’s hand falls down to the armrest and she she pushes up, eyes scrunched up as she shuffles towards the end of the bed. Zippers and plastic strips of factory packing crinkle up quietly in the enclosed space. Beatrice moves in to replace the vacuum, silent like water when she slips past with an easy sidestep. Ava watches Beatrice watching her, or everything but her. It’s as if the older woman is intent to study and look at every part, every facet of her body except her eyes. Fingers uncharacteristically wringing once and slow as she lowers down and takes up the low seat Mary had previously occupied.

The crinkling at the foot of the bed goes on, plastic adhesives and locks popping free from what Ava theorizes is the first aid kit. Beatrice takes a breath quick and measured before she speaks.

“We theorized that Vincent was targeting the halo the entire time.” Ava’s head turns and takes the older woman in, even if she’s still not really looking _at_ her - but some undefinable space to the side. Her fingers gone limp on the sheets not a few inches away from Ava’s shoulder. “He needed to draw you out so he relied on your impulsivity and struck for the weakest link.”

...

“Camila’s gaurd was down. There was an opening in her left flank, back hand situated down along the opponent’s lead forearm on a path where it barred between her eye and hand, just in her blind spot. He feigned a strike and created an opening for you to throw yourself in while the rest of us were occupied encircling you, ensuring target optimization with the line of impact so you’d be hit by the divinium bomb he’d planted ahead of time to simultaneously drain the halo with a blast of energy in protecting Camila.” Beatrice eyes blink, a shadow flicker of discretion like a pass over glass and water. “As well as dispersing the rest of us with the effects.”

A pause in the rhythm. A stutter veiled with atmosphere and heavy vicious gravity, so layered and writhing Ava can feel it roil like the wraiths tumbling and clouding in the air. Electric thunderclouds, just beyond the verge of a rendering fiery lightning storm. She can feel her skin underneath the sheets, the hairs on her arms stand up with the static in the air in familiar anticipation.

Ava - doesn’t want this _._

“…-effectively draining the halo and killing you before it had a chance to replenish..,” she cuts deftly. “A flawless strategy.”

Ava rolls her shoulders against the springs. Broaching enough gain and leverage to face what she can of Beatrice’s curtained face. It’s only then that Ava is struck by the fact that Beatrice is actually wearing civilian clothes: a simple grey pull down hoodie that bunches up around the sleeves so that it appears oversized - but comfortable. She looks younger in normal clothes, softer. The blandness of the Cat Cradle uniform cast away from sheltering a more approachable image and slender shadows that curtain the slope of her neck down where her collar bone peeks from the hood. The change in wardrobe is…off-putting. In a good way, she decides belatedly - a little delayed by the short circuit procession buffering in her thought process. Briefly, she wonders if she might have also been concussed in addition to having been blown to bits by an angel’s halo.

She clears her throat and blames it on the cotton mouth, already faded - already gone. “Guess I shouldn’t be so surprised,” she says, and then quirks when a thought arises. “What’s the saying? Fool me once, fuck you. Fool my twice, fuck you again?”

_“Is everything a joke to you.”_

…

…

…

Ava’s mouth hinges slightly with an uprooted shock that seeds into her eyes. For the longest time all she can seem to manage is to look up at Beatrice in shaken surprise. And then the slow metamorphosis of confusion that slowly begins to lace with a hurt and a shame begins to crinkle her eyes like tinder plugs. What’s truly pathetic is that she well and truly looks like a kicked puppy, unable to hide the despair and betrayal behind a facade that she can’t think to construct for the sting of the reprimanding slap. Beatrice’s face holds firm and stoic for several seconds, expression as cold and pallid as the bare chill against Ava’s bare skin, and then she is up and gone before Ava can even think to speak. Silence pervading the room once again like a phantom shadow cast on the wall.

Ava looks up at a loss. And then in a small voice… “was that my fault?”

Mary only sighs and frowns disapprovingly from the foot of the bed, a roll of sterilized pack bandages and medical tape in her hands, disinfectant sloshing around in the foggy plastic bottle tucked under one clothed arm as she looks down at the sorry sight.

The next few moments are occupied with an awkward shuffling as Mary orients the younger girl to a semi upright position propped up slack against the headboard. The odd pair spend an hour minimum compromising limbs through shirt holes, lifting the fabric and leaving one arm in so it hangs limp around her shoulder. Mary cuts loose the soiled wrappings and pulls away the cotton padding underneath from the blistered weeping skin, face pinching a little when it doesn’t come away dry.

Ava doesn’t look. She feels it well enough to know it isn’t pretty. But in fruitlessly guiding her attention away from the task at hand, her eyes trail below where the covers have upturned and lay half rumpled around her raw scorched and speckled legs. The shrapnel did a number, ripping gauging strikes across her shins leaving deep divets were there should be flesh. Abscess where she should be whole. Her chest is just as bad, rashy and blistery like it’s been burned away with a solar flash of concentrated UV lamp. The skin bubbles in different places, uneven and splotchy in patches where her hip puckers worse than her shin, her shoulders more tender than her sides. It’s all tender and open like a sun burn stripped and flayed out on a dry rack, so she shuts her eyes to it and quietly lets Mary wrap the cloth around the worst of it, the mummy wrappings already weeping through her shoulder blades shiny and wet.

By the time they’re done and Mary has all but dragged Ava onto her back she is a puddle of sweat but too drained and exhausted to mind. A hum grinds out from inside so that the pain can find some emitance from the vessel of her simmering body. Mary’s hand settles on her forehead.

“Sleep. Things will look better in the morning.”

So Ava trusts. And does.

__________

The next few times she comes to are inarguably easier. The violence has dissipated leaving only a waking crusting ache and crackling embers. Against her desires, Ava remains bedridden throughout the following day and consequently resides herself to pushing past the nostalgia of encompassing boredom. It reminds her of being back in her bed at the orphanage, pushed up against the window when sister Frances would forget to shut the blinds, and Ava would splay her good hand out - reaching and open like ivy leaves in the light and dust and flowing growing space.

They’d ended up in some non descript missionary stationed a good travel distance from Rome’s city limits. Out in the back lands where the mountain villages ambled up cove side cliffs, and where the people had enough sense and suspicions to…understand their situation. The rooms, food, and fresh change of clothes as well as medical supplies and considerable discrepancy on behalf of the acting Father had all procured itself from there. And as far as Ava was concerned, that had been that. 

Lilith keeps tabs on the news covering the latest fallout that’s been classified and neatly filed under an ambiguous terrorist attack. Ava smirks at that. _She’s finally gone viral and it’s not even one of the least prevalent things about her!_ To which Lilith rolls her eyes and promptly leaves through the conjoining door between the two rooms all four sister warriors and one bedraggled severely sun burned halo bearer collectively occupied. Though Ava is eager to note she elected to throw the remote down on the sheets rather than horde it away in spite. 

“We’re all at risk of excommunication and all you can do is worry about your non existent celebrity status,” Lilith gripes from beyond the plaster wall, tactfully folding sheets and smoothing down comforter crinkles so she can’t actively strangle the indisposed girl. 

Ava draws her brows together and screws her mouth incredulously like an exaggerated caricature. “Uh, excommunicated from an indoctrinated patriarchal cancerous dogmatic sexist toxic rotten to the core - ” 

“Says the _non believer_.” Lilith’s form lingers agitated and stoked from the conjoining door in Ava’s peripheral, a stray shirt rumpling loosely as she jabs it in the bearer’s prone direction. But Ava’s played this game longer than Lilith, and she knows how to win if not enjoy herself along the way.

“Did I mention elitist?” Ava’s breath passes for a laugh as she deflates back into the pillows, indignation spent and drained with the exertion.“ _Pew,”_ she scoffs. “Please. It’s a bench.” 

Camila, the absolute angel, has the decency to grieve appropriately and occupies the chair next to Ava’s bedside while placatingly flipping through the five shoddy cable channels they get on the old tube box. She’s glad for the company and warmed by the support when Camila humors her and smirks conspiratorially while side eyeing her disgruntled sister in arms. The youngest pair laugh mutedly into their chests and devolve into half hearted cackles while Lilith's stomping and storming can be heard through the doorway. The stretch in her sides hurts in the best way.

Eventually, Camila sputters to a natural ceasing calm and before fixing Ava with a tender prompting gaze.

She sighs. “I feel like shit…” confessed quietly to the young nun’s sympathetic eyes, already entertaining the idea of a timely nap. 

Though an unspoken implication traverses quietly in the lieu of words both said and unsaid, it was true - Ava did feel like shit. Tired. Exhausted. Raw and in pain in a way that she…shouldn’t. Not for this long. The halo had never taken its time like this before. Had never mended and stitched the cells of her skin back hour by hour so painstakingly slow. 

“You don’t think - “

“Don’t worry about any of that,” the young nun whispers sagely and Ava’s mouth clamps shut like a chastised child. “You took a hard hit.” She says reaching out and placing a reassuring hand across Ava’s blistered bandaged one, eyes connecting earnestly. “That’s all.”

Camila’s smile is soft and encouraging, and the warmth of her palm bleeds down through the bandages. It’s placating and soothing, easy to lean into and trust if she wanted, she knows, but - 

Ava’s still not so sure.

Idle hands made for idle minds after all. And Ava’s mind in particular had sufficient practice with entertaining all sorts of thoughts with nothing better to do. Was their greatest asset and weapon against Adriel somehow irreparably damaged because of her impulsiveness? Her recharge time fundamentally stunted because she’d predictably played in so easy to Vincent’s lead. She hadn’t woken paralyzed, not in the same sense as when the OCS first gracefully stumbled upon her in the morgue. But she hadn’t woken with that humming ethereal strength she’d grown so used to either. She briefly considered if the Halo maybe functioned like a battery with a finite lifespan and thoroughly spent in saving her life for the second time during their conjoined lifespan. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to move or feel her limbs if that were the case (and probably wouldn’t be alive to think such things if they were staying true to theory). But when Ava reached out for the presence that had taken residence in that reserved space within, the metal felt inactive. It felt - dead.

“But - “ she cuts off. She doesn’t really know what she has to rebuttal with, despite the progress and handle she’s gained over the halo in the amount of time she’s had it this is all still relative and new territory. And it _is_ true she’s never taken a significant hit like this without the divine instrument standing in between her and the blunt trauma. She hope’s that’s all it is.

Camila sits in resolute silence as Ava contemplates the impossible and unanswered, reassurance and comfort rendered stale by circumstance.

She hasn’t heard anything of Vincent. Not to say she doesn’t give it a considerable amount of concern and mind even as his presence remains withheld and mystified. The thin wall of ply and plaster doesn’t bother blocking the sound of the wind at night, and she finds it hard to believe he’s cooped up in the room beyond. She supposes a flock of ragged battered catholic nuns eddying an unconscious priest through the lobby propped between them all in ropes _would_ come across wrong…But she assumes he’s in good enough hands when Camila assures Mary and Beatrice had it under control.

Otherwise, it’s been completely and wholly bizarre how familiar this all feels. In the time that she spends awake she acquaints herself with the patterns in the ceiling, counts the kernels like stars and makes constellations from their disorder. Easy patterns, easy transitions she already knows how to compromise and navigate from a previous life. Though some things do part and differ. Camila and Lilith are significantly more palatable than her previous caretakers for one. They help change her bandages to check on the halo’s progress, prop her up and feed her when she can stomach it. They help her to the bathroom in a long and arduous travel from one end of the hall to the other, and they don’t even complain when she has trouble getting down onto the seat. It’s embarrassing but necessary, and Ava’s pride remains more or less intact while Camila lets her brace her forearms on the descent and Lilith respectfully bars the narrow stall door with her imposing form. She’s thankful for the help - “but seriously, would it kill the bastards to put in a bar?”

But most relevant and noteworthy of all is that they sit and talk with her. They tell her how their lives used to be structured in tightly mandated block schedules before Armageddon, how they would be in combat skills right now if it weren’t for the apocalypse - how Mary would be…elsewhere.They change the channel when it gets boring and solve crossword puzzles when that also proves obsolete. They even incline towards keeping a tally of who holds the highest score in a trivia/scrabble spin off (Ava surprises them with the amount of inane information she hoards away in her head like a squirrel’s winter reserves). Camila even brushes out her hair the way she’s taken to having it.

It’s all so similar and so different than when she was at the orphanage - it’s a little disconcerting. She remembers how Sister Frances would handle and levy her down from the bed before popping off the brake on her chair. The image of Diego’s hesitant and ambling gaze trebles after her like a lost child across the threshold, wheeled out through long tunneling hallways before she can think to reassure him that she’d be back soon. The wheels squeak and whine down reflective linoleum, top lights reflecting stepping stones down across a panelling roadway and double doored gates to the world outside. Out into blinding light. Out into sun where she would squint and blear into the hot white glare that blinded with ocular flares. Ava shuts her eyes hard. Scrunches her face and pulls inwards with what muscles that can still obey as she flees to the dark recesses of her mind inside and shielded from the light.The sound of gravel under wheel and foot, mind screaming to block it out as the nun rolls them down the weeded walkway like a parading fool.

_Until eventually, inevitably, they arrive and Sister Frances would jam the lock down on rubber. The brake pinching tight to the wheel as the view shuttered into place before her._

_Ava’s breath catches on a wheeze, her chin tucked down and slack on her starchy shift at the shoulder when she speaks. “It’s Sunday, Sister.” She says quietly - silently praying for a little victory._

_“Father Mateo has promoted the congregation of Sunday school in addition to the regular curriculum,” Sister Frances says, and Ava just knows she’s burning holes into the back of her head. Fingers clasped, smile plastered like a billboard. “On my suggestion of course.”_

_Despite her eyes having been closed and her mind being trained towards emptiness, she could still hear the schoolyard across the orphanage’s gates. The strip of roadway asphalt paints across the gapvoid and abyss like a black serpent as the tar dug deep into the earth, separating her and the people running free on the playground across the gap. Her eyes still squeezed shut, she could sit and absorb the scuffs of their shoes on cobbled pavement. The sun on her back, their laughter in her ears. Absorbed so thoroughly and unrelentingly she would find her mind transported back to the past.Tears, under the bedsheets past the thunderstorm of her parents, so soft and quiet you’d be hard pressed to say she was crying at all._

_Another hour then, spent faithfully soaked to the root of her core until Sister Frances was well and truly convinced the message had sunk in. It would’ve been a waste of cruelty if it hadn’t._

For the remainder of the day the sun stays out. And even though the bed is low set to the floor in a way that limits her view, she can stretch against the cotton and frame out the sky and a single olive branch dangling against the pane. The call of birds teasing her with promise and rising freedom as she dances in and out of sleep throughout the day. Drifting into wakefulness, out of peacefulness, into consciousness, back to quietness - as if she’s a leaf, skating across the water’s surface with the breeze on her face…the clean air filtered through her mending fibrous lungs. Her chest aches when she tries to breathe the wish.

Lilith and Camila appear to stay with her for the majority of the time, sometimes Mary. She sleeps for an undefinable span of hours, and wakes incrementally to the constant presence of one of the ever rotating Ava watch. Absent one party of course…

That is until she wakes to the night sounds, trebling tree frogs trilling in the dark. A pitch canvas voids the sky, the thin branch limb gone still as the wind ceases with the world outside. It’s as if the only bubble of matter and material burned down to this one spare room, this one empty pallet and bunk, and her solitary self. 

Ava’s eyes crinkle. Brows turning down as she soaks in the absence. A rare and foreign moment that might have once struck her with the fear. She’s lived enough years alone in a vacuum…But now it is a welcome respite from the tumult and whiplash that’s been swirling and thrashing her with its current ever since she was reborn. She never went to middle school but she feels as if she just lived it, high school, college, unemployed innebriated twenties, and mid forties existential crises within the span of a year. 

She couldn’t walk a year ago…Huh. Little big victories…

The reverie is pierced by her own awakening. Only coming to full awareness when she suddenly realizes she is not in fact alone. Her attention perks when she spots Beatrice, kneeled down at the foot of her cot. Ava exhales slow and imperceptible, letting the air seep in throughout her body as it expands and breathes on its own. The other woman’s head is bent down slightly, lips moving soundlessly, spare for a soft whoosh of breath fraying a stray strand and her hands are clasped around a dangling rosary in the candlelight. She’s changed back into her habit now, but Ava still thinks she can see the light go fuzzy and soft around the edges. Glowing…

There’s no division or mark to say that Ava settles at the sight. Her body feels as limp and dead as it did when she was resigned to the life of a cripple. Her muscles are loose. Her face is soft. There is nothing but her conscious presence alone to lay claim to animated life…and yet her body here, relaxes with resolution.

It isn’t a minute later when the door adjacent swings open and Ava feels more than perceives the shift in atmosphere. Judging by Beatrice’s still reverie, she doesn’t seem to acknowledge it.

“…So you finally talk to her?” Mary’s voice doesn’t press, but there are traces. Traces of some superior authority that all but drips with maternal expectation. Ava’s grown to know that tone well. It makes the corners of her lips quirk wryly to hear another under its thumb.

The young nun doesn’t respond immediately, responsibly finishing the tail end of her Hail Mary or Our Father or whatever other devout prayer she deemed appropriate before gently motioning the sign of the cross and turning away to Mary who’s leaning against the door frame.

“Are you referring to Camila or Ava?”

“…”

Beatrice sighs. If the nun could physically appear sheepish, the way her eyes lower and cast away is as close as it would come.“She was asleep when I rotated with Lilith. I thought it best to let her rest,”

There is a lull where neither pair elect to voice their thoughts - choosing rather to consider each other stoically as pensive equals across the hold of open voided space until Mary breaks the tension and intakes a deep and breaching sigh.

“Alright, well. You’ve been in here a while. I’ll take this one.”

Before either can make a move to alternate posts and steal away her chance, she strains forward and croaks through the dead kindle wood, “Beatrice…?”

Both Mary and Beatrice’s eyes cut to her, unaware that she’d been conscious or for how long. She must’ve looked pitiful enough to not chastise her though because neither woman bristles or braises at her interruption. Ava swallows the dry patch on her tongue and catches Beatrice’s watchful roving eyes that reach out, embrace, and hold…

Ava’s head empties. Heart tickling at the sudden rush she finds vaulting out of her own captive body. And she finds a quiet determination thrumming within, against the metal between her shoulder blades, against the pulse she can feel in her stomach. Yet not a sigh or word to lay definition - let alone voice - graces her as she gazes towards what she hopes is deliverance. She should say something. Say something! - Anything

“…I need a favor,” she settles on weakly.

Mary, to her credit, only eyes the two briefly. First on the back of Beatrice’s shrouded head, the fabric of her habit hanging and shuttering loosely like a curtain to an outside eye. And then the younger woman’s reserved and pensive face. A strange calm and resolve embedded in the seal of her lips and sunken eyes - connected with Beatrice’s so vitally. Ava is being honest, if not in character. Eventually, she departs with one fleeting glance before she passes out into the hallway, leaving the two to themselves.

Beatrice lingers for an insurmountable while, pinned and captivated by something intrinsic in Ava’s expression from the pillow. She looks concerned, offset, but more than anything intrigued. The young nun keeps her eyes keen to the image as she approaches slowly, each fluid movement drawing nearer towards the bedside chair before she settles lightly - perched on the cushion with a vague and inscrutable gaze.

As she sits Ava’s eye catches on something else nearby, the sight of the familiar otherworldly glow that’s propped up against the bed chair in an evenly criss crossed manner by Beatrice’s elbow. She exhales a soft incredulous whisp of air through her teeth that whistles a little on the down draft.

“Oh, good,” she mumbles as Beatrice’s eyes trail down and follow her line of sight. “You saved the boys…”

The twin short swords hum appreciatively when noticed. Hilts and handles going comfortably warm with familiar excitement as if eager to please their master when they brighten against the wood grain. Beatrice lifts one of the swords and bears it across her lap, the metal gentle and delicate in this manner and context that they rarely occupy. Though Ava knows its bite to be anything but when she considers the lethal sting and accompanying burn the weapon delivers when wielded in earnest fury. Her eyes can just trace fondly enough across the cruciform pommel in the candle light, just below on the adjacent guard where the word ‘Abel’ is carved deep and gothic into the metal. It’s brand and mark embedded like a stark against the backlit blue that haloes around the blade. Similarly, she knows with natural abrasion that if she were to pick its partner, she’d find a match in the word ‘Cain’ scarred across the engraving, sired and yielded by the same fathering cruciform sword that Ava had melted down and casted herself to better befit her bipartite tastes.

Beatrice brings a hand to settle the thrumming metal, thumb caressing down the grip, and then fall to wrist guard.

“I still can’t believe you did that.” She remarks. Decidedly neutral in delivery so as not to betray her true thoughts, “I’ve never seen Mother Superion change colors like that before.” Which just meant she found Ava exasperatingly scandalous - and thus an object of humor.

Ava’s lips ease a reflective smile and she shrugs half mindedly on purpose to play the part. “Having a sword called Adam isn’t as cool.”

“It was the sigil of our order, a namesake that had hundreds of years of service resting on it since the crusades.” Beatrice delivers blankly.

She hums thoughtfully, taking care to set the bait. “Hundreds of years you say?…You guys really pushed that software update to the side didn’t you?”

The look she gets in return is scolding and incredulous, and honestly makes her soul preen inside her flaking sun burned body like a posturing peacock. Which is another item all its own. The blisters finally look like they’ve begun to mend, superficial layers of skin turning sweltering red to patchy pink to a leathery brown to an itchy bubbling top layer of flaky skin. It’s slow, and gradual, but she suspects the halo was having a hard enough time getting her lungs back on the mend so she takes it as a good omen that the papery organs do not scream and writhe now when she tentatively stretches and expands her center. It’s good progress, but she still frowns. Brows sinching at the crease as she observes the divinium blades.

“…I thought about what you said.” She finally says. “About - being such a dick all the time - “

“Language,” comes the admonishment, quick and reflexive. Though Beatrice only looks up when she speaks again. “And I didn’t call you that. “

“You get the gist,” Ava supplicates. “Just listen.”

The other woman’s chin raises ever so slightly and delicate, she could honestly be a statue - an Olympic edifice with the way the light cradles the soft rise of her marble cheek. But she is receptive and open this way and Ava recanters her focus in order to preserve the gravitas of the moment.

“ I…I know, it’s a problem.” She tries, struggling with the deliverance of what she imagined so simply in her head not moments ago. “It - it’s just - “ _compulsive? instinctual? an irreparable insatiable gangrenous part of her._ “how I am.” 

_I hate it._

_“…_ It’s always been that way.”

Beatrice is silent as she digests what Ava’s offered palms up in her vulnerability, at her weakest. The apology unspoken, the implication all but. Beatrice takes a moment to consider before she responds. 

“I apologize if I made you feel as if I thought less of you,” eyes flickering back down to one half of the melted and repurposed cruciform sword. Abel’s quiet reserve singing lowly against Beatrice’s palms with humming vibrations. And Ava decides she likes seeing the blade handled by someone she trusts.

“For the way you handle adversity,” She settles with quietly. And Ava can feel that she means it. “Nothing could be more untrue...It was my own fault for forgetting that - we’re not the same….”

Beatrice trails off here. And Ava can’t quite discern the stitch and crinkle at the corner of her eyes. Can’t tell if it’s a pensive or reflective frown that’s now gracing her downturned lips, if the woman sitting across from her is burrowing too deep into unreachable depths for her own good. She wants to reach out regardless, just in case and hold her hand to reassure her. 

“I wouldn’t say that…” she mumbles instead. 

Beatrice blinks from the reverie and refocuses on Ava’s discerning gaze. Her face turned absent and fleeting as they close and conceal the turmoil behind heavy shuttering lead lined curtains. And she smirks.

“I guess this is just an inflated way of me saying thank you,” she says, “for giving me something to work on.” 

_Still,_ Ava thinks respectively, _her voice betrays her._ Ava felt her lips and foggy eyes tug down. She suspected there was more. And she feels as if if she shouldn’t be surprised, it was always more with Beatrice. Always. 

Why should she ever expect less than abhorrent less? She thanked God in that moment, that there was always a bottomless depthless _more,_ top layered against her soul whenever anything ever came to all that was Beatrice. It made her fingers flex in excitement, anticipation with the rush of discovery - like a secret adjoining only they knew how to discern and decipher. The resulting adrenaline is relieving and exhilarating in its swooping eager fulfillment that Ava can only guess feels hopeful. And in the strangest - but then again in the most natural way, proud.

“…well,” she concedes. “I am pretty great,”

_“Tsh_ ,” and Ava smiles wide at having gotten a rise out of her. A smile that blossoms further along the satisfied feeling in her healing scabby chest when Beatrice finds amusement in her absolute brattiness. The world set aright again, as it should be. _But…_

“…But I get it. S’all you’ve ever known. It’s all that’s ever been. Having to just all of a sudden break out of that when it’s all that’s been around to...” Ava ponders it a minute, mulling over the taste of what she’s trying to say in her mouth before releasing it. “Save you - ,” she decides, “ - is hard to let go of.”

She shifts her foot underneath the blanket, closes her limp hands over each other and squeezes tightly to consider her next words carefully. This had to be handled carefully, delicately. “Anything else is just…”

...

…

“…Ava?”

…

“….you were…born into the club, right?”

Beatrice wasn’t expecting the sudden and unannounced change in topic and Ava can tell it perplexes her. “Pardon?”

“Catholic,” she’ says, eyes flickering to pass over and connect with Beatrice’s over the effervescent hues of the candles and cast. “You were born catholic? Like, you didn’t have to…come to it on your own,” she clarifies, and reclines back further into the sheets as she lets Beatrice turn the question over in her hands, fingers tracing Abel’s cool countenance as if drawing on its essence while she attempts to formulate an answer.

“In some ways…” she finally broaches, “yes. I suppose you could say I was born into the church.”

“And in others?”

“My family had us go to church every Sunday,” she starts, chin to chest so that her eyes are averted and shaded by the contours, shadows pooling in the dips and valleys. “Father had me enrolled in CCD and youth groups after school, extra community service hours on the weekends, silent retreats……choir.” She tags on half mindedly, and Ava smiles if only to encourage that she’s attentive and listening.

“…It felt natural enough to elect for early postulancy. I’d already memorized both testaments and at least half of the pre packaged sermon anecdotes. Products of procrastination and all,”

“ _Ugh,_ like the pew hopper? The resident father at St. Michael’s _loved_ that one.”

Beatrice’s lips quirk. “There are some considerations for originality…”

“Well yeah! He’s only had the book for a thousand years!”

“The point being,” Beatrice insists quietly, shushing Ava naturally. “None of it…changed, anything. Not in the way that fit the official criteria; and I guess a part of me knew it never would. I was - devastated. To say the least.”

…

“And relieved.”

…

“The guilt of that alone was enough to push me to throw myself deeper into the church and OCS. There wasn’t much distinction to the feeling...I just knew I was in turmoil, and that - it wouldn’t have made a difference if I was irrevocably disreputable or devout, I was always burning for something I hadn’t even chosen - by the church or by God, I hadn’t thought it mattered. But it wasn’t until I began to understand that…it goes deeper than what I can manifest or manipulate in myself, in superficial projections or manifestations. There’s always been an arrangement that’s already been fixed into place, without naves and steeples erected around it by dogmatic equivocators. Continuing the pursuit in this way is just,” a pause. “Reflexive, I suppose.”

_…_

“In the end, I suppose you could say I choose the church more than it choose me.”

Ava cannot hear the cicadas here. Though she knows their singing is successive and unbroken like the constance of the tide. But now more than ever, she feels a pull to answer the call she’s unconsciously been ignoring since she’d awoken in that church morgue. Calling to her across the stretch and fuzzy dark blotting out the barred rose windows with its patent and bricked walls.

After a while…”Does a priest have to work their magic on you before it’s official then? Special ceremony, sponsors?”

A suspicious beat. There has to be a punchline to this meandering narrative. A destination to the unfolding journey that must’ve been set out with some initiative. Beatrice had acclimated to the instant gratification of half baked puns and cringing dad jokes.

This wasn’t in the script.

“Traditionally a priest would perform a baptism in a church, maybe a river. But if the intentions are true enough and circumstances allowing…I suppose anyone could perform one.”

Something in the younger girl’s chest seizes with an energy and force that makes the whirring thrum of the halo pale in comparison to this newfound presence in her heart. So Ava, true to nature and impulsivity, grips it tight and runs with it, leaping off the cliff and abyss wings spread wide.

“I’d like you to baptize me.” She says.

“…”

“Please,”

“…Ava - “

“Just in case. I know it’s a…an ephemeral…soul searching…journey…… _thing_. And I should probably - I don’t know - meditate on it for forty fortnights or something,”

“…”

“I just don’t know how much time - “

“You’re _not_ going to die.” Beatrice tenses with the oath.

“The halo’s been really stubborn about that lately hasn’t it?”

And Beatrice noticeably stiffens. Nowhere near as free and readable as Ava, who would have gone stock stiff like an electric bolt ran through her spine, but slow and marginal like a stiffness taken over adeadened corpse.

“I think,” Ava struggles for a minute, parsing the words evenly to something palatable with the delivery. “I think I might’ve had more than a close call, this time. Does…does that sound right?” She asks.

She’d been playing with the idea ever since the halo hadn’t bippity boppity booed her injuries away upon consciousness. She recalls the resident lagginess and woozy recovery time it had taken to put everything back together the first time around, the seeping flow of the halo’s energy bleeding into her body in a way that felt familiar in a subconscious sense. Lilith and Camila’s timid tip toeing and careful behavior when they thought she was asleep had only helped piece the puzzle back together. Whispering was only for people who had secrets after all.

_“shattered her legs,_ ”

_“ruptured her heart,”_

_“She was dead.”_

The young nun is silent as her bearer. As silent as the moon mounting and ascending higher and higher to its peak, light so luminous it blots and floods out the candlelight radiating off Ava’s skin. The younger girl’s sleeves are rolled up, her shirt buttons splayed open to reveal wet and sticky bandages canvassing across pink and patchy skin. Beatrice’s jaw holds like steel.

_She had gone quiet in the night as the van trebled over back roads and pit stops._

_A hand in hers the entire time, splayed out across the back seat with a lap for a pillow and whispers for a lullaby. Promises and assurances made good._

_None of them had known she had slipped away until the three am dusky dark had passed over, and Beatrice could finally see her that her chest just simply wasn’t rising. That, at some point in the night, she had been clinging on to nothing._

Beatrice collects herself in pieces as her throat bobs and she rasps, “I wouldn’t let that happen.”

“…I’ve run out of time before, Bea.” _Twice now,_ she thinks morbidly. “It’s always one more day until it’s not.”

And Beatrice doesn’t think she likes this new Ava. This new and mature halo bearer who accounted and planned for the very unwelcome possibilities set out before them. That shouldn’t be Ava’s concern; she had them for this kind of thing, she would always have them. Beatrice had promised. But…the halo bearer held an irrefutable point to light that Beatrice would be a fool to ignore - people died in their bathrooms for God’s sake. Died on the way to grocery stores and evening walks on the sidewalk. That didn’t even begin to account for the psychopaths and murderers like Vincent. And the nun that had already claimed Ava’s life as her own once before. A roaring and tearing feeling rips deep in her chest at the thought of what should’ve been Ava’s care taker, her _protector_ \- manipulating and tainting such a sacred duty over the younger girl. The image of a complacent and rigid corpse in a body bag that wore Ava’s face, had Ava’s hair, Ava’s eyes…but gone cold. Gone limp…It’s enough to make Beatrice’s shoulders rise as she feels a pull to shield and protect the younger girl from all the world’s wearies and woes, a promise deeper than oaths and vows in that it had already been pledged without her having to say so. But then she thinks of Shannon. She had tried to protect Shannon then and failed.

Mary had tried to protect Shannon too.

“…Why me?”

“Well I’d rather not have to ask Vincent,”

It’s not _exactly_ a laugh, but the air passes differently out her mouth, lowered down to the side as eyes train stubbornly to Cain’s burning hilt - still avoiding. Ava wishes she’d look at her.

“Not really sure if he even qualifies as a priest anymore. Do you have to file for stuff like that? Like…petition to excommunicate?”

Another one. And this time it’s a little wet, but quick and unbidden like maybe it took her by surprise. An unexpected delight she never would’ve suspected from the most unlikely of sources. When Beatrice’s head finally raises up, Ava’s heart swells a little at the shine.

“…I trust you.”

_Because what else is it that describes how she feels about Beatrice?_

“…and I don’t think the others would ever let me live it down, so - there’s that.” Her attempt at caressing the glassy shine collecting in the other woman’s eyes without harm. Because that is the last thing she wants to cause, she thinks as she allows something inside to extend. Leaves tapering against the glass outside with a quiet and unobtrusive _tink! tink!_ on the panes.

“you’re probably right,” extended.

“…will you?”

…

__________

It’s late now, crickets and tree frogs tapering gradually as twilight riddles between the spheres of night and day. The missionary hall light buzzing an easy orange moth light. No sign of wakefulness from next door, a bump against the dresser, a squeak of shifting bedsprings…Beatrice wonders if the remainder of their party elected to vacate in favor of packing in that respectful buffer. On Ava’s behalf, she is grateful.

With one fluid breath in she wills her heart to settle. Ava laid out before her, muscles lax and eyes dropping a little with phantom exhaustion. But her irises are clear, and her chin is lifted in a calm expectancy she can’t quite pinpoint as nervous, but can’t define of anything else either. She decides it is humble.

“Do you wish to be baptized in His name and in His light?”

“…I do,”

“And do you renounce Satan and evil in coming to new life and rebirth?”

“…I do.” It trembles a little as it takes flight. But no less determined and sure, so Beatrice turns and motions over the salted tap water that rippled restlessly from the journey between the resident kitchen sink and their broom closet room. Beatrice had offered to fetch an actual priest outside of Vincent, surely their host could rouse the groundskeeper for the keys and access to the baptistery’s font. But Ava had insisted the less fan fare the better, not even electing to have a witness other than Beatrice if it could be helped.

They were allowed a private moment, a personal moment that needn’t concern anyone outside of the immediate. This was between them and God.

Beatrice turns back to the charred body splayed out bare on the bed. Fabrics rumpled back as they pooled around her legs, shirt open and unbuttoned so her collarbone juts out and rises against the flame. The breath draws out like slow ingratiated gasp when Beatrice erects her spine and moves to speak, “Ava Silva - “

“Avanelle,” Ava interjects, reluctant and timid, almost shy as the name is brought forth like a humble offering at the sacrifice. But no less determined and sure for it as Beatrice takes in the eyes shining raw and undone in the sheen of wetness that has appeared to have ruptured and broken free like an unearthed spring of swirling emotions.

So many emotions - wariness, eagerness, nervousness, hope, an inexorable inexplicable flickering ember of fear reflecting back at her in the candlelight, sputtering down to the flecks of rendered simpering coals. _Trust._ All swirling amidst, betwixt, around and under in flipping cartwheels like incorporeal energies as her burnt body laid complacent and motionless beneath Beatrice’s hovering hands.

They lower slow and graceful to her wrinkled brow, smoothing out the worry and anxiety. Her thumb drawing across once in a notion of support that allows the younger girl to draw in one lifting heaving breath. As if mountains and the weight of suns and stars are settled here on her chest, dissolving into nothing as they and herself pass away - fall away with a single facade of a name, self entitled and christened upon a crippled sinner, an abandoned orphan who’s only namesake had been a wishful hopeful lie…

_Ava._

_Life_

_Dreams of birds and island grottos overflowing from the fount like free fall past the sill of her bedroom window, the bars of the enclosed courtyard._

Ava feels her mind unmoor, “my name is Avanelle,”

“…Avanelle Silva, I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Beatrice makes the sign of the cross over her body. Head, heart, shoulder…knighted and entitled with the force of the divine itself before anointing the apex of her forehead with rich velvet oil. Emboldened and invigorated by holy reserve deeper than the halo embedded to her flesh, deeper than broken nervous systems and useless spinal chords, the well run so infinitely depthless she feels the fear dissipate as it intensifies. Mountains on her shoulders as good as weightless feathers.

“Didn’t need to uncork the good stuff just for me…” the halo bearer, born anew, laughs breathlessly. Squints as the warm viscous liquid drips down slow like gold in the light. Drip down in the line of her eyebrows, creasing lovingly to the corners of her eyes and nose and curving dimples.

Beatrice smiles approvingly. A secret pride blooming close to home like a bird taken wing from the nest. “We can afford some luxuries,” and she deserved as much.

Her hands return once again to the top of the young bearer's head, still rested against the pillow. Palm ran back against stray hairs to smooth down the shaking raggedness that’s has them both exhilarated and lead limbed with effortless strain. Another easing pass. And another. And again. Petting and soothing back the electric energy that has nothing to do with the preening halo, singing like heralding angels and whirring in hail of momentous glory.

“…thanks,” so bare and peaceful, Beatrice cannot tell if it so much as left her lips as it did fly straight from her soul to Beatrice’s. Oil running through splayed hair like a flowing river, down into the sheets, down into skin. Beatrice silently reaches across the fields of coverings to caress the wetness leaking down across the halo bearer's cheeks into infinity.

“You’re welcome,” Beatrice whispers. “…Avanelle.”

_Avanelle._

_Gift of God_

**Author's Note:**

> I spent way too much and way too little effort on this (which -…how?). Let me know in the comments if this deserves a part II, haven’t decided yet.
> 
> And for those of you who aren’t Catholic and didn’t understand the ‘pew hopper’…if you go to church enough you realize that some priests have ‘fallback’ sermons for when they didn’t prepare anything for that week’s service, and so there are some stories that get reused and recycled throughout that community - one of them being the story of a priest who would ‘hop’ between pews (yeah I don’t get it either). I’m sure it has a moral, and I’m sure it’s very reflective and universal but I never listened that long to understand it so - haha.
> 
> Please comment freely and constructively. Feedback, both positive and critical, helps more than you know.


End file.
